5 Awesome Tips & Strategies to Promote Your Content on Instagram

A few weeks back, Instagram celebrated its 5th birthday. Did you know that in just 5 short years, the platform has gone from a single post shared by Instagram’s co-founder, Kevin Systrom, to more than 80 million photos shared every single day from around the globe?

Indeed, from brands like Burberry and Levi’s to Ben and Jerry’s and PayPal, thousands of businesses are on Instagram, creating and sharing interesting and inspiring content. Instagram is, in effect, a proven way for businesses to raise awareness for their brands. The key to success is to know how to leverage its infrastructure to target your message more effectively and reach people based on what they care about. After all, Instagram is a growing community of 400 million and if you are not using the platform to be discovered by—and interact with—customers, you do so at your own peril. The things you can do on Instagram include:

1. Using the platform as your shop window to touch, inspire and move people
2. Using landscape photo and video to give your advertising a more cinematic feel
3. Video ads of up to 30 seconds for rich storytelling
4. Using Marquee to “own a moment” and drive mass awareness, perfect for things like a new product launch or a movie release

The challenge when it comes to Instagram is that as more and more people and brands jump onto the platform, the noise level for individual users is increasing. To really stand out from the crowd, you need to understand how to promote your content on Instagram for maximum reach and impact.

Tips and Strategies to Promote your Content on Instagram

1. Tell a Story

Instagram has a singular focus on rich visual storytelling. As such, some of the most popular brand accounts on the platform reflect their unique identities. Take the high-end basics retailer Everlane, for example. Harnessing the power of whitespace, the brand has created a sense of clarity and simplicity in their storytelling, offering a glimpse into the fashion industry. Correspondingly, their content includes photos of neutral tones and elegantly sparse compositions, reinforcing the idea of transparency in their storytelling.

So whether your photos are featuring your products, personality or customers, they should deliver a cohesive message about your brand that will resonate with your target audience.

2. Create High Quality Content

Businesses do best on Instagram when they share well-crafted content, driven by a clear objective. To that end, tell your story through captivating images, videos and captions. The trick is to create concepts that align with your campaign goal. In particular, you want to make your ads branded and ensure brand consistency across campaigns like an identifiable color palette or a recognizable photographic style.

Your content should also focus on craft drawing people in and keep them wanting more. Some ideas for engaging images and videos include:

Product shots

Behind-the-scene images

Coupons and deals

Image quotes- inspiring, humorous or motivational

Contests using a contest-specific hashtag

3. Best Practices for Sharing your Content

A common complaint among business owners on Instagram is that it’s a challenge to continually attract new followers. The key to success is to know how to share your content with the world. More specifically, you need to:

Use popular and trending hashtags. Use a good mix of brand specific, industry specific and trending hashtags for maximum reach and impact

Post often. After all, the secret to every long-lasting relationship is consistency. To form a bond with your Instagram audience, you need to stay in touch consistently

Use a tool like Piqora to discover the types of photos and videos that are resonating with your target audience so you can post these more often

Post at the right times. The best days to post are Sunday, Monday and Thursday but this rule is not set in stone. You also need to test out optimal posting times with your own audience

Use questions and calls to action in your captions

4. Find Kindred Spirits to Follow

Next up, Instagram offers a number of ways to find relevant users to follow including importing your existing Facebook friends and email contacts. Alternatively, you can also find relevant users in your niche, influencers and other brands using third party tools like Iconosquare or Websta. Nurturing your following is important to extend your reach.

5. Enrich and Engage your Community

And finally, the core value of Instagram lies in its engagement rates. The easiest way to engage users on Instagram is to like and comment on their pictures. Just remember to @mention both the creator and other commenters. Then of course, you also need to engage people on your page. You can do this by: